


don't know where, don't know when

by DreamerWisherLiar



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Angst, Depression, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Torture, Not Really Character Death, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-30
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-04 12:11:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15841059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamerWisherLiar/pseuds/DreamerWisherLiar
Summary: Athos doesn't turn up at the crossroads, but someone else does.





	1. Lost

**Author's Note:**

> This is based off a tumblr post that I can't find again to link, but I suspect was by automaticdreamlandkid. It mentioned that the original planned ending for S2 might have had Catherine turning up at the crossroads with a gun. Once I read it, I couldn't stop wondering where on earth they planned to go from there - I mean, I assume they weren't going to kill off Milady de Winter, I doubt they were going to pick up the next season without a timeskip of at least a few months, and I have real trouble imagining Catherine successfully keeping Milady her prisoner for very long. So I wrote this as something they definitely would not have done but that I liked as a story idea.
> 
> By my standards, this will actually be a very short story. Someday, I will have more common sense than obsession, and I'll start sleeping instead of writing. That will be nice. Until then, enjoy endless stories, and I hope they don't start feeling too repetitive.
> 
> I didn't check the graphic violence tag because there's nothing graphic, but there are some references to torture and killing.

“On the road again?” Porthos says genially, but everyone can see the concern on his face.

Athos shrugs, tries to ignore the itching in his shoulders, the desperate need to get going. Everything is sorted out for the day. He wants to get going. He needs to. It’s a long ride. He swings himself onto his horse, which prances a little before calming.

For more than six years, Athos has had one hobby and only one hobby: drinking. It’s not a particularly healthy way to spend his time, but it fills the hours, blurs the past, and blocks out the present. When he’s sober and he contemplates the rest of his life, every year filled with weeks, every week filled with hours, every hour filled with seconds of her _not being there_ – the drag of exhaustion is so overwhelming he wants to lie down and stare at the ceiling and just wait to die. He nearly did back when he believed her to be dead. On his better days, his duty to the Musketeers helps; on his worse ones, it’s just another thing dragging at him, another weight pulling him down. It’s overwhelming to think about all those moments, one after another, the impossible effort of getting up and going on and doing things, training every day just to train again tomorrow, forcing painful smiles for his brothers to ease their worry, a repetitive and empty life with no end in sight except the death she once promised him. Who can live seeing the world as hollow and pointless? Viewed like that, alcohol isn’t just a pastime, it’s a salvation. It’s kept him going for years, blocked out that grief and loss and terrible, wrenching guilt.

Of course, now he has another hobby, and it’s even worse.

“I understand your paranoia, Athos, I do,” d’Artagnan says before he can head off. “We all know Milady lies as easily as she breathes. But Treville’s sent off to people in London. If she did keep her word to leave us be and go to England, they’ll write back and tell him. And if she stayed here – well, Milady’s a bad penny. Those always turn up. There’s not much we can do to prepare for it except avoid walking alone in alleys.”

Athos shakes his head at the younger man helplessly, not sure how to explain that he doesn’t care if she comes after them again, that in fact he’d welcome it if he walked around a corner and found her knife against his throat. D’Artagnan thinks he wants to keep track of Milady out of fear of what she’ll do, the chaos she causes, the lives she takes. Instead, Athos’s fear is quite different. What if she meant it when she said he’d never see her again?

It’s only that he doesn’t know. She disappeared before sundown, leaving nothing behind but carriage tracks and a glove. He doesn’t know her fate, where she is, what she’s thinking.

She’s probably in England right now, of course, that’s the most likely outcome. Asking him to meet her – well, maybe it was all an elaborate punishment, the glove a last taunt. A deliberate manipulation to force him to admit his feelings for her to himself, only for her to reject him before he even had a chance to voice them to her. Or perhaps she meant it at the time, only to have second thoughts after waiting for hours, aware he could have shown up already and assuming that his tardiness was his answer.

He just… needs to be sure. Hence his new hobby of attempting to track her path. He started by trying to find her end point, like d’Artagnan just mentioned, but no one has sent word from England that they’ve seen her. He sent queries to all the ships that travelled the route from Le Havre to England that week, offering a reward, only to find nothing there either. The guard captain at Le Havre has been looking into it and come up with no sightings. The same situation holds for Rouen. Noblewomen travelling alone are rare. Someone should have noticed her, surely.

When he considers the possibility that she might have lingered too long in France and been trapped by the ports closing as war was declared, the breath goes out of him, his hands tremble, he thinks wild thoughts he has no right to think. If that’s true, he can track her down, he can speak to her. But it’s not just selfishness anymore that keeps him searching – at first, he looked for her purely from his self-centered desire to know where she was, but the more she seems to have vanished totally, the more worried he gets.

Now he’s reduced to looking for the inn where she spent her first night on the trip from Paris to Le Havre, hoping he can trace her from the beginning of her journey somehow. Even if he finds it, it will tell him nothing at all about where she is now or what her plans are. D’Artagnan’s right – it’s a fool’s errand. But addictions are not cured so easily by reason.

It’s late by the time he gets to the next little town on his list of places she could have stopped at. He’s checked six towns in the past few weeks, for a combined total of eight inns and seven taverns. Some of them have logs and he always scans down them – not for her name, since he knows she’d use a fake one, but for the handwriting she might not bother to disguise. In every one of the places, the proprietor is eventually happy to help the angry-looking Musketeer with his investigations, and he has heard so many descriptions of women that he’s fast becoming numb to them. A lot of women have pale skin and dark hair, after all. Thankfully, he’s acquired an account of her appearance as she left the inn she was staying at in Paris that day from a maid there, so he knows what finery she wore. He even managed to locate the dressmakers she bought her clothes from and they gave him a drawing, since they were a place fancy enough they often sent fashion plates off to the nobility for their consideration.

“A blue dress,” he specifies to this innkeeper, holding out the picture. “In this design.”

“It was over a month ago, and who looks at dresses?” the man protests. But at a flat look from Athos, he returns to studying the picture. “Fancy. Wait, blue, you say? Perrette, get over here.”

The girl stops cleaning tables at the other end of the place and comes to join them. The innkeeper passes the picture over to her, and she studies it as well, squinting. She strokes a finger down the fashion plate admiringly.

“There was a fancy lady in a blue dress a while back, wasn’t there? I remember you talking about her,” the innkeeper says. “Was she wearing this?”

“Yes,” Perrette says immediately. She gives Athos a shy smile. “I admired it a lot. The height of fashion, you know. But she caught my notice more because it wasn’t quite right – there was a ripped flounce, for one thing, and for another she was missing part of the outfit.”

“I’m sorry?” Athos says, heartrate suddenly doubling.

“It was so fancy it seemed odd that she didn’t have – now what was it? Oh, yes! She was missing a glove,” Perrette says. “And her hair was quite wild as well, and she had no one accompanying her and nothing with her, which was strange. I asked her if something had happened on the road and she snapped at me to mind my own business.”

He had thought Anne had a carriage, a coachman too, although he hasn’t located either. He discards that thought for the moment to focus on Anne herself. “Did she say anything else? Anything at all?” 

Perrette shrugs and flushes, looking away for a long moment. Eventually, she brings her gaze back to Athos, cheeks still pink with embarrassment but eyes defensive. “Later on – well. I sometimes flirt with the customers, you know, to encourage them to tip. I am not _improper_ , though, just friendly! Anyway, I was speaking to another when she wished for attention, and I did not notice her signaling at first, so she called me a- a lazy, common slut, said I was ignorant of her consequence.”

Athos stares at her, surprised. Anne can be sharp-tongued, he knows that better than anyone, but that seems unnecessarily vicious. And also uncharacteristic – Anne’s insults tend to be cleverer than just spewing invectives at people.

“I suppose she was in a very bad mood?” he ventures. God knows he was a mess after he realized he missed her at the crossroads, and perhaps he wasn’t the only one.

“No, not at all, apart from when she snapped at me those times,” Perrette says, still offended. “In fact, she acted like she’d had a wonderful day.”

Well, that was a blow. “A wonderful day?” he repeats, feeling stupid.

“She was – triumphant, almost. Smug. You know,” Perrette shrugs.

“Pale skin. Curly dark hair?” Athos double-checks. His heart aches at the thought it could all have been just another game, one she was thrilled to have won. “Very, very beautiful.”

“Pale skin, yes, but her hair wasn’t that dark,” Perrette says, frowning as she struggles to remember. “Actually, I think it was red. Reddish? Anyway, she was pretty, certainly, especially in that dress, but I don’t know if I’d call her -” She glances up to see Athos’s frozen expression, decides she must have offended him greatly by not considering the woman he’s so intent on beautiful, and flushes again. “Sorry. Please, forget I said that.”

“Red hair,” Athos says numbly. “And… she was alone? There wasn’t another woman with her? Or perhaps a coach outside with people in it, or luggage stored at least -” 

“Just her, m’sieur, as I said. She rode a horse here, and had no baggage. I thought that was strange as well, but I didn’t say anything.”

Red hair, insulting the maids for promiscuity, talking about her consequence, and wearing Anne’s expensive, lovely blue dress. But with a torn flounce, with a missing glove, her hair messy as if from a struggle. He has a sudden, vivid mental image of Catherine callously stripping the fine dress off Anne’s pale, still body to take it as her own – but no, Athos is a soldier. He knows people do not usually die without mess, even in a hanging.

That’s almost worse, though, isn’t it? Catherine, her pistol to Anne’s head, forcing her to remove her jewels and gown to stand shivering in her underclothes before shooting her, trying to take away the natural dignity she’d always resented so much in Anne. Stealing Anne’s little treasures, her pretty clothes, all the proof of what Anne made and found out of nothing, taking unjust revenge for all the things she thought Anne had stolen from her. There’s no way Anne would have given up her belongings without a fight, without a real threat to force her to. There’s also no way Catherine would have stayed in the area and been in high spirits if Anne was still alive to come after her in retaliation for the theft. The only scenario that fits –

He scrambles to try and find other explanations, but he hasn’t tried to indulge in optimism in a very long time, and finds he’s unpracticed at it. Instead, he’s used to looking on the darkest possible side of things, searching for the most cynical explanations, the nastiest truths. It’s too easy to fall into that now, to let the knowledge fill him: Anne is almost certainly dead.

He’s cold. He’s nauseous. There is nothing but swirling emptiness inside him, and if he examines it, he will fall into the hole and he will never stop falling. He doesn’t know what to do. He could guess where Anne might go – England, Rouen, Paris, Le Havre – but he has no idea where Catherine would. And he has to find her, that much is clear, he has to hurt for this, destroy her like she’s destroyed him. No, not destroy, he doesn’t do that, he lets the law deal with people – but he wants to see her hang. He will see her hang. He hates hanging, but the desire to see Catherine hang for this burns him from the inside, ugly and vicious and the only source of warmth left in the world.

He has to find Anne’s body as well. How near the crossroads is it likely to be? How close was he to his wife’s corpse as he stared at her glove and brooded about his own heartbreak, as he mourned the idea of never seeing her again? He’s heard nothing of a body being found, but he hasn’t been asking for that, hasn’t been looking for it – he pictured Anne in trouble, or Anne _causing_ trouble, he never imagined her dead. Did Catherine bury her? That seems like more respect than Catherine would want to give her perceived rival, and it would take some time for Catherine to dig a grave, but she might do it to avoid Athos discovering what had happened. Only he has discovered it anyway, and it’s a self-inflicted pain, because he never had to chase down Anne, he could have let her be, he could have let it rest. He could have spent the rest of his life imagining her happy in England, but now he knows she never made it, and he knows that it’s his fault.

 _Shoot her and let’s be on our way_ , she said, and he – what did he say? No, he didn’t say anything, just glared at her for her cold-heartedness. He could have shot Catherine, or at least turned her over to the law, but no, he begged her forgiveness and let her go free to come for Anne again, and this time she succeeded.

“Captain?” the innkeeper helps him to a chair. Athos is shaking so hard he can’t stand anymore. After he drops down onto the seat he bends over in agony, raw and wrecked, arms wrapped around himself. After a second he straightens but that only seems to alarm them more. His expression must be awful. “Perrette, the wine – no, something stronger. The best we have. Captain, drink this – Captain -” 

He drinks it, downs it so quickly his throat burns. They refill it. He drinks again. Still, it’s an hour before he can stand properly once more. Part of him is desperately ashamed of that – he needs to be on the move, he needs to find Catherine, needs to find Anne’s body, needs to know exactly what happened. But it’s been weeks. There’s nothing he can do in the next hour that he can’t do in the hour after that, or the hour after that.

Their story ended – his and Anne’s story ended – and he knew that, but he thought it was a different ending, a less permanent ending, maybe even not an ending at all. He’s been living his life as if she were an ocean away, and that was pain enough, but now she’s a whole world away, in the next world, where he can’t reach her.

X_X_X_X_X

Porthos is cleaning his pistols when he hears d’Artagnan’s sharp intake of breath. He looks up and feels his own eyes widen in dismay. He’s seen Athos half-destroyed by drink, swaying on his feet, looking like death. He’s seen Athos miserable, Athos furious, Athos grieving, Athos in a hundred terrible states. He’s never seen Athos like this.

Or, wait, yes, he has – Athos’s expression was milder, back then, but Porthos feels a faint flicker of recollection as he looks at him. That absolute devastation was in Athos’s eyes when they first met. It was dulled by drink and time, but it was there, a sort of blank and naked horror nothing could disguise. And recognizing that, Porthos knows immediately what happened. He feels it like a blow – more for Athos than himself, but there is some shock there on his own behalf as well. Milady threatened Constance, tried to kill the Queen, and left a trail of bodies behind her wherever she went – but she also saved d’Artagnan, and she saved the King and Queen, and she saved Aramis, and he knows she loved Athos, however strange and twisted that love may have been.

“What do you think she did this time?” d’Artagnan says in an angry undertone as Athos approaches, because he hasn’t seen that expression before, and he doesn’t know.

Porthos swallows hard and then takes the few steps forward necessary to pull Athos into a tight hug. The other man submits to it, even pats his back in a weary sort of way, but otherwise it’s like hugging a corpse, cold and limp. “I’m sorry,” he says into Athos’s ear, even though he knows words are useless right now.

Athos pulls back after a long moment, gives a sort of nod. It seems like words are beyond him now.

“What happened? You can’t mean to say – she’s not – what _happened_?” d’Artagnan says, anger fading to a sort of horror as well, and Porthos thinks he understands. D’Artagnan despised Milady de Winter, but he needed her to be alive to despise her like that. For good or bad, whether an ally or an enemy, she’s been a constant in their lives for some time now. And now there’s Athos, looking like death, and none of them could ever hate Milady enough to want that. “How – how did she -”

“Catherine,” Athos says.

“Catherine?” Porthos rakes through his memory. “Wait, the lady from Pinon? That Catherine? You sure?” He wouldn’t have expected someone like that to pose much of a threat to Milady de Winter, but he supposes anyone can get lucky.

Athos just nods again.

“You -” D’Artagnan looks like he doesn’t want to continue, doesn’t want to force Athos to say more, but he knows he has to. It wouldn’t be the first time Milady de Winter let Athos believe she was dead. “You’re sure she’s dead? Did you see -”

“No,” Athos says. “I’ll go back tomorrow. Start looking.” He swallows nothing but air, dry mouth clicking painfully.

Athos has a meeting with Treville tomorrow, but Porthos doesn’t say that. He’ll go to the meeting, make whatever excuses he has to. Treville will understand.

“You can’t be sure,” d’Artagnan says stubbornly. “If you didn’t see her…”

Athos lays it out. His tone is flat. His eyes are broken. Catherine, smug, triumphant, wearing Milady’s dress, nobody with her, no carriage she could have hidden an unconscious or bound woman in, Catherine apparently certain there was no one coming after her. And no sign of Milady anywhere, not in Paris or Rouen or Le Havre or England, Milady disappearing at the crossroads and not spotted since.

“Imprisonment?” Porthos says doubtfully. “Maybe she handed Milady in to the law.”

“Catherine’s tried to kill her once before,” Athos says in a dead voice, and then while they’re adjusting to that news, continues, “I can’t see her scaling down her revenge, not now. And Anne’s not even _wanted_ by the law, not anymore. His Majesty pardoned her and Catherine has no proof of any wrongdoing. No one would arrest her just on Catherine’s word.” He lets out a little cracked, manic laugh that may be the worst noise Porthos has ever heard. “No one but me, anyway.”

“Worth checking, anyway,” Porthos says, though he’s not sure it is. Are they giving Athos false hope? Fuck, of course they are. But looking at the man’s face, it seems like some kind of hope is necessary, false or not.

“Perhaps she sold her into slavery,” d’Artagnan suggests.

“Main use for white slaves are galleys,” Porthos says. “Lot of demand right now, sure, but they don’t take women. Women are worth hardly anything as slaves and you’d have to take a white female slave pretty fucking far to make a sale.”

“The de Belgard type of selling, then,” d’Artagnan says, warming to this idea. “Alright, she’s hardly a virgin, but there’s probably someone out there who’d get a thrill out of the idea of having the King’s former mistress -” he cuts himself off, visibly horrified, as Athos flinches. “Athos, I only meant – it’s possible she’s not dead. There’s no guarantee Madame de Garouville tried for the same revenge twice.”

“How would someone like Catherine have met people like that?” Athos asks, and they have no answer. It’s pretty unlikely.

“Still, another thing to look into,” Porthos maintains. “Not to mention, she could have trapped Milady somewhere, could have left her someplace to deal with later. If she did that Milady could be in a basement somewhere living off mushrooms, or could have gotten away weeks ago and be anywhere in France.” Also unlikely. But Milady de Winter’s life has been a series of improbable escapes and survivals, and they shouldn’t write her off.

“Do you really think so?” Athos says, and he still looks destroyed, but there’s a just a fragment of hope in his dull, dead eyes, just a little spark of life.

“It’s not definite until we find a body,” Porthos says, wondering if this is cruel. But he’s right that there’s a chance. With her, there’s always a chance, surely? 

As it turns out, they don’t find a body. In fact, they don’t find any trace of Milady de Winter at all.

But six months later, they do find Catherine.


	2. Missed

“Dead?” d’Artagnan says, rather stupidly, he knows.

The man – Baron Claude de Bouen – nods. “She passed away a month ago. She was complaining for months before then, nearly from the moment we were married – headaches, dizziness, what have you. Honestly, it seemed like just her usual whining.”

At d’Artagnan’s probing, he goes on to describe the illness in more detail – d’Artagnan’s not Aramis, and he’s certainly not Lemay, but it sounds like natural causes to him. A slow illness, a painful one, but no obvious signs of poison or foul play.

D’Artagnan can’t help but notice that Catherine’s widower doesn’t appear to be too struck down by grief. Claude’s in his late fifties, rather plump, one of those people who’s so expressive with their hands you end up fearing being hit, and his expression of benign good humour is so convincing that it’s hard to imagine he lost his wife a month ago.

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” d’Artagnan says, despite this.

“To tell the truth,” Claude admits, “It wasn’t really a love match. Catherine had money from her first husband Thomas, and I had a few gaming debts I needed help with. She liked my title, I thought she was pretty enough, if a bit cold… it seemed ideal. It wasn’t, of course. Well, live and learn, I suppose.”

“Money?” d’Artagnan says, caught by the word, straightening a bit. Athos is out dealing with something at the Louvre, so it’s up to him to wring every bit of information he can out of this unexpected meeting. Although d’Artagnan thinks he’ll probably force de Bouen to stay at the Garrison until Athos gets back no matter how much information he gives – it’s not that d’Artagnan thinks Athos will come up with any more questions than he will, but he will want to talk to the man, that’s for sure. Maybe it will help him somehow.

Athos hasn’t been the same for the past six months. He does his duty like an automaton, going through the motions with brisk but dull efficiency, but it’s obvious to everyone he’s not coping. He moves like every limb aches. In the first few months, he spent every hour he could spare riding north-west, not that he could spare much time what with the war ramping up. Still, he must have searched every square foot of land around the crossroads and the inn where Catherine de Garouville stayed that night, with no result – not that that means much, with the Seine so close, a well-known dumping ground for bodies.

After he managed to figure out that Catherine headed to the north-east of France afterwards, it became impossible to follow the clues and do his duty as captain at the same time. It had taken the combined persuasive powers of Porthos, d’Artagnan, and Treville to talk him out of quitting, to convince him that he would get further using the influence he had as captain than if he went haring off chasing a ghost from his past. So for the past few months, Athos has instead spent every hour he can spare on a more traditional form of dealing with grief, crawling down a bottle, as he waits for the queries he sends off to come back with responses. D’Artagnan is more concerned about his friend than he’s ever been. Athos drinks with grim determination, face twisted in anger and self-hatred, as if he’s trying to drown himself in wine.

“How much money?”

Claude stares at him like the question’s a bit vulgar, but d’Artagnan just meets his gaze and waits, and eventually the other man shrugs and names a number.

It’s not unimaginable riches, but it’s significantly more than Captain Treville gave Milady for her help. Still, who knows how much more she could have had on her? If Milady really was planning to leave for England, d’Artagnan suspects she would have had a few little stockpiles of cash and jewels around Paris to dig out and take with her, whatever she told Athos. And there’s no guarantee Catherine got it all from Milady, either, though d’Artagnan has difficulty imagining the woman committing highway robbery – she would probably have considered it beneath her.

“Did she ever mention a woman named Milady de Winter, or possibly Anne de Breuil? Or a man named Athos?”

“The captain who sent the messages looking for Catherine? No, as far as I recall, that’s the first time I heard of him. Some relation of Catherine’s first husband, I assume?” 

“Anne de Breuil,” d’Artagnan repeats, to avoid answering this. “Did she ever mention an Anne de Breuil?”

“No, never.”

Athos opens the door and leans in. He has a serious look on his face, jaw set. “D’Artagnan. Porthos is gathering the men out front. I need to speak to you all.” He glances at Claude, disinterested. “Who’s this?”

“Baron Claude de Bouen,” d’Artagnan says. “Claude, this is Captain Athos, who sent you those messages.”

Athos’s expression changes, sharpens from indifference into intense, almost furious interest. “The same Claude de Bouen parish records list as having married Catherine de Garouville?”

“Catherine d’Athos, I believe, before she was de Bouen,” Claude corrects. He thinks about this for a moment, then shrugs. “Or maybe she used her maiden name instead of her last husband’s when we signed things. It’s hard to recall. But yes, I was married to Catherine.”

“Where is she?” Athos asks, just skipping past the whole ‘last husband’ reference and the use of his surname. His gaze is dark with anger, and his voice is pure iron.

Claude leans back, looking alarmed. “Dead, I’m afraid.”

“Dead,” Athos says flatly after a moment. He looks like he’s taken a blow. Then, his gaze brightens. “Stabbed? Her throat cut?”

D’Artagnan winces at the question. They’ve truly come to a strange place if Athos is on the edge of his seat hoping Milady de Winter’s out there assassinating people. “Illness,” he says before Claude has to answer.

“Poison, maybe,” Athos suggests. “Was it a quick illness?”

“Sounded like natural causes,” d’Artagnan says, almost apologetic.

“Why would anyone want to kill Catherine?” Claude asks, confused. “She could be a bit difficult to live with, certainly, but she wasn’t -”

“She may have killed someone,” Athos tells him. “We need to know what happened. Did she ever say anything about hurting someone? Fighting someone, maybe? An enemy?”

“Catherine?” Claude looks like he’s suppressing a laugh. “She was a lady. Of course she never _fought_ anyone. Such a thing would overset the sensitive soul of any woman. I mean, it was clear Catherine was traumatized beyond words just by finding her first husband’s body. Violence is abhorrent to women.”

“What did she say about her ‘first husband’s’ death?” Athos asks. 

“What, do you think she killed him? Have I had a narrow escape? This is absurd.”

His open amusement fades when Athos leans over the desk, face hard. “I suggest you begin taking this seriously, monsieur. Her first husband. What did she say about his death? Did she ever mention the culprit?”

“Only to say she made sure they received justice for what they did,” Claude says. He looks from one face to the other. “What did I say now to make you look like that?”

“Did she say what form that justice took?” Athos asks, voice cracking. D’Artagnan knows he’s been pinning his hopes on Milady having somehow escaped Catherine’s revenge, disappearing into the depths of France or going to England after all. Knowing Catherine was sure even months later that Milady de Winter was no threat to her anymore is not comforting.

“No, she… wait, yes! One day when she was ranting. She always did rant. She said she made sure they got the same as their victim did, and with just as little mercy. Not knowing how monsieur d’Athos died, I can’t tell you what that means.”

“I think you had better wait outside,” d’Artagnan says, because from the way Athos looks, the room may not survive the oncoming storm. To d’Artagnan’s surprise, though, after he’s turfed out Claude and shut the door, Athos doesn’t begin throwing things. Instead, he slumps over the desk like a puppet with the strings cut, head bowed, gripping the edges of it with hands that shake.

“So she’s dead, then,” Athos says hollowly. He straightens after a very long moment and looks at d’Artagnan, eyes curiously blank but face carved in deep lines of grief. “And I can’t even see Catherine brought to justice for it, because she’s dead as well.”

“I suppose Aramis would say God brought her to justice,” d’Artagnan says, something he would never say with Porthos around, what with how hurt the other man is by Aramis’s departure. Right now, though, he’d say anything if it would get that look off Athos’s face.

He can’t pretend to understand how Athos felt about Milady de Winter, the way half the time he seemed to want her dead and the other half he seemed destroyed at the very thought. He has no idea why Thomas’s death no longer seems to infuriate Athos, why Catherine murdering Milady is an indefensible crime in Athos’s eyes but Milady’s many assassinations seem to have been forgivable, or why any man would want back a woman who seemingly does nothing but cheat, lie, steal, kill, and try to ruin him. But when d’Artagnan thinks of his Constance dead, all the breath goes from him, and his throat tightens in sympathy. He understands more, he thinks, now that he has a wife as well – not that Constance is at all like Milady or their relationship is really comparable to the mess that was Athos and Milady’s, but being married is a partnership, is forever, is in good times and in bad. Whatever else Milady de Winter was, she was Athos’s wife, and he loved her.

“We have our orders,” Athos says, not responding to d’Artagnan’s comment. “That’s why I had Porthos gather everyone. I need to go and let them all know we’re finally going to the front.”

“Will you… are you going to…”

“I’ll do my duty,” Athos says, with great bitterness and even greater grief. “There’s nothing else I can do now, is there?”

X_X_X_X_X

There’s a boy in front of Athos, barely of age, visibly petrified. The pistol he’s holding is shaking, but it’s pointed broadly at Porthos, and so Athos does what he must. Not that he could let the boy be even without the threat – if a single enemy gets away from this ambush, the Spanish will know where they are. His blade moves like an extension of his arm, a fast and brutal stab that finds the boy’s heart. He long ago lost count of how many Spaniards he’s killed. He knows how few deserved it, though. But what can he do? That’s what war is.

He, Porthos and d’Artagnan have the honour of being among the few people on either side of this war who really understand why it’s being fought, who were involved in the events that caused it instead of just hearing the propaganda. They know what King Philip tried to do, know about Rochefort, about the Queen. Understanding why they’re doing it doesn’t make _what_ they’re doing more palatable, however – the boy he just killed had nothing to do with his monarch’s treachery. He was just a boy, a boy born in Spain instead of France, dying for his country with no awareness of the rights and wrongs of the situation.

Is the pang of annoyance Phillip will feel when he hears of another loss worth that boy’s death? The world would be a much better place if Athos could simply march into His Majesty the King of Spain’s palace and slam his stupid fat head against the wall a few times as punishment, instead of butchering his way through an army of men not that dissimilar to himself and his friends. There is nothing clean about what they’re doing here. In Paris, he could be a Musketeer, could feel honorable. But it’s hard to feel honorable when doing a soldier’s work.

_I’m a soldier, just like you._ She told him that once. _Well, maybe not quite like you._

There was nothing clean about what she did, either. He remembers despising her for that, but he can’t quite remember why. He doubts she was ever drenched in half as much blood as he is nowadays. He tells himself all the men he kills are armed, that it’s a fair fight, but the truth is an experienced Musketeer against a boy barely old enough to shave is the farthest thing from ‘fair’ he can imagine. It’s a slaughter. In most other areas, the Spanish are holding ground or even winning, but here the Musketeers are slicing their way through the enemy like a knife through butter in each encounter.

At night, as he drinks whatever he can get his hands on and stares blindly at the glove that’s all he has left of her, he tries to imagine what Anne would say. It’s a habit he got into during the long years after he had her hanged, a way to torture himself with her absence, but it was always difficult, because back then he didn’t know what parts of her were lies and what were truths. One moment he would be imagining what his sweet, loving wife would say; the next he would imagine the mocking, scathing insults of the seductress and murderess he’d sentenced to death.

Now in one way he finds it easier, because he spent enough time with her to start to know her again, to see the woman below the masks – she wouldn’t comfort him with soft words or scorn him with vitriolic condemnation. Instead, she’d throw sarcastic comments at him, a sharp edge to her words but real concern hidden under it: _My God, Athos, you brood enough for the whole regiment. D’you really think it’s your fault that warfare is bloody? I’m sure before you along came the Spanish threw cakes at your men instead of bombs. How arrogant can one man be?_

And then sometimes, even later at night, he imagines her head on his shoulder like it had been that night after they had come back from going through Rochefort’s documents, whispering to him in the darkness like she was telling secrets: _Not everything is on you, Athos. You can’t fix the whole world._ But then, to Milady de Winter, her affection for him probably always did feel like something she had to hide. Her softer side, the gentleness she could show, the way she loved so fiercely it almost burned you – all secrets she seemed like she would kill to protect. It made the few moments when she let her armour fall even more of a miracle than they already were. When he thinks he’ll never see her that way again – never see her in any way again – well, it seems unfathomable, impossible.

So it’s easier to guess at what she might say than it used to be, but that’s the only way in which it’s easy. When he lets himself think of her – when, in fact, he chases thoughts of her, drowns himself in them – he’s ripped apart and ripped open again, every time, left breathless and destroyed. He savours wounds almost as much as he savours alcohol, now, because at least that pain can heal in time, and it’s a distraction from the kind that can’t. She called the world diminished, but he’d call it empty instead. He’s empty as well, he thinks, and he’s only pretending otherwise for the benefit of Porthos and d’Artagnan.

History has proven that neither he nor Anne have some unerring ability to sense when the other is dead – he never felt a warmth glowing through him, telling him she was still out there, during those five years of suffering; she didn’t know until she felt his presence behind her that his ‘death’ was simply a trick. Despite that, he feels unreasoningly that he should have known, that some great light should have gone out of the world with her passing, that he should have felt it like a stab to his own heart when hers stopped beating. Perhaps it’s that belief that makes him think he’s seeing her from the corner of his eye all the time, that causes him to think he can smell her perfume even above the smell of blood and burnt flesh on the wind. Sometimes when he stumbles back to his tent he expects to find her waiting for him.

Today, Porthos is waiting outside instead. “We got ‘im alive,” he says, giving Athos a weary grin. There’s blood on his teeth. Athos supposes it will at least cover up the taste of mud that seems to be a constant here.

“Good job,” Athos says, forcing himself to concentrate. They’re sorely lacking in information, and the Spanish seem to have plenty. He always tells his men to capture the leaders, and they always do their best to, although no one’s exactly fond of trying to get the information out of them. “Is he speaking?”

“I left d’Artagnan with him, said I was going to get some tools. Another half hour of me being terrifying and d’Artagnan being nice should make him ripe for a few questions.”

Athos nods. It’s easy enough to occupy himself for half an hour, making sure the wounded are getting treatment, seeing the Spanish bodies are moved or hidden. They’ll have to move their camp again, regardless, but it will buy them time.

There aren’t many Musketeers, and they’re a strike force, not a real regiment. If the Spanish knew their exact location they could swamp them with numbers, harry the Musketeers down to nothing. It would be easy. But they don’t, so they can’t. Instead, the Musketeers turn up unexpectedly, kill everyone they can, retreat as quickly as they can. It makes the Spanish too nervous to press any further into this part of the country. They’re doing well. As always, they’re outnumbered, but not outgunned.

The Spaniard Porthos caught seems just as nervous as his men. He’s speaking almost before Athos can get the questions out. Locations, numbers, intelligence, their commanding officers. One name catches Athos’s attention.

General Suarez isn’t a fan of the front lines, and he isn’t an excellent strategist, or an incredible leader, or any of the other things you’d expect a general to be. Instead, what he’s very good at is bringing together information. He knows more than anyone else on either side about the locations of French and Spanish troops, what the political map looks like at the moment, who is in each position and what their skills are and even what some of their plans are. Sooner or later, every French prisoner or Spanish communique passes through his sphere of authority, and he sucks the information out of each one and moves on.

And right now? Right now he’s only three days hard ride north. Through half the Spanish army, of course, but still quite close.

“You’ll have to stay,” d’Artagnan points out. “You’re the captain.”

“I can leave someone else in command for a week or so,” Athos says stubbornly. This mission is absurdly dangerous, and he won’t let them go without him. “And I’ll send off to Treville, let him know. We’re already down one man with Aramis at Douai. I won’t send you two off alone.”

The option of sending other Musketeers is, of course, dismissed immediately. Every one of them are brave and skilled, but when it comes to missions like this, they would be out of their depth. He won’t send them to their deaths. Whereas he, Porthos and d’Artagnan have done this kind of thing before.

Somewhere deep down, he wonders if this is in fact a suicide mission. To his shame, he’s not averse to the thought. Quite the opposite, in fact. He hopes that his friends survive it, but for himself, he’d rather go down covering their escape or something like that. It’s not about dying for France, or dying to protect his brothers, though both would undeniably be good deaths – it’s that he craves the idea of an end, of finally stopping, of following Anne into Heaven, Hell or even oblivion.

He’s tired. He’s done.

X_X_X_X_X

They ride north in extreme secrecy, ducking Spanish patrols and encampments. If they’re caught, they’ll be killed, it’s that simple. On the second day they’re found but it’s a small patrol and they kill every one of them in minutes. The last one survives the initial fight, and begs on his knees for his life, and Athos desperately wishes he could let him go. But they can’t drag a prisoner north with them for this mission, they can’t risk backtracking south and extending the mission by several days, and they certainly can’t release him to report their presence. There’s nowhere to tie him up and leave him safely. Athos kills him because it’s his duty and so that d’Artagnan and Porthos won’t have to, and feels sick.

Anne would have killed the man without thinking twice about it, he knows. Slashed his throat with easy, ruthless pragmatism. No matter what she said about not wanting to lie, cheat or kill anymore, she could always see in straight lines and she would do what’s necessary. She’d wanted to do that with Catherine as well, after all. _Shoot her and let’s be on our way_ , but he hadn’t, and she hadn’t, and look how well that ended. 

They reach the place where the General is staying late on the third day. Infiltration has never been their specialty, but no one’s expecting the French this far north, and if they expected anything, it would be an army instead of three people. They knock four people out and interrogate two of them on the way in, and end up having to split up to make sure they find the General before they need to steal new horses and flee. Porthos heads towards the General’s office – whether or not the General is there, he can at least grab maps and missives, get them _something_ to make it worth the risk. D’Artagnan goes for the training yards since he’s the most believably Spanish, despite being as French as any of them – again, whether or not the General is there, he can at least find and prepare horses for them to get out.

Athos takes his living quarters, where the General is most likely to be at this hour. There are two guards at the door but he manages to deal with them without making too much noise, and one has a key to the room. The door creaks as he opens it, and he has his sword at the ready, although he won’t stab Suarez. The General’s a relatively small man, and the plan is to knock him out and carry him away under cover of darkness. All his information brought back to France, ready to be used.

The room is dark, but he can see a huddled shape on the bed. As he watches, the person turns over, sits up, and lights a lamp.

It’s like a blow to his stomach, leaving him gasping, breathless, barely able to stand. The world pitches and turns around them, but one thing holds him steady, stops him from falling, a reference point in this suddenly alien world. Her familiar, mocking green eyes are like a magnet for his gaze, holding him trapped, and he never wants to be released.

She’s wearing a thin nightgown that bares her pale shoulders, and has a pillow crease pressed into one thin cheek, and it takes her a second to really shake off her sleep and register his presence. He watches as her eyes widen in surprise, then narrow in sudden annoyance. She swallows and sets her jaw, as if to make up for her unwilling shocked inhalation. He stumbles forward one step, and then another, suddenly sure he’s dreaming.

“About fucking time someone got here,” Anne says sharply.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry to the people who wanted Catherine to be punished, but I'm just not interested in her enough to make a relatively short story mostly about Athos or Milady getting revenge on her (plus, being Catherine always kind of seems like a punishment itself - that lady is seriously bitter and unhappy).


	3. Found

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My headcanon for Athos/Milady after the crossroads is basically just "they're together!" All the other details are malleable and will probably continue to change with everything I write. Still, I hope you liked this one!

“Anne?” he asks dumbly. There is something like horror in his eyes, and it stings her.

She rolls her eyes, already moving around the small room, gathering things, pulling a thick cloak over the nightgown. “I take it you didn’t expect my presence?”

“What? Of course not. I thought -”

“England didn’t work out,” she says dismissively. It’s perfectly true, but in this case, the reason England didn’t work out was because she never arrived there. “So you’re here for Suarez, then. He’s in his office. He always remembers some important thing he just _has_ to write down when he’s trying to get to sleep. I assume one of the other idiots is there right now?”

“Should I ask why I just found you in his bed?” he says, still looking shell-shocked. My God, the man’s slow. He should be used to their paths inevitably crossing by now, no matter where either of them go, no matter what either of them do. It’s hardly her fault she’s broken her word never to see him again – she didn’t _ask_ to be here. She’s just surviving, as she always has.

“Not unless you’d like me to answer,” she flares up momentarily, before forcing herself to return to her matter-of-fact tone. “I was planning to make a break for it in a few weeks, once I had the chance to gather a few coins and pay off a few scores, but this will do. I suppose you won’t let me kill Suarez on the way out, though? Since you want him for yourselves and all.”

“What did he do to you?” Athos’s eyes darken, immediately protective.

“Bored me,” she drawls. She has everything she can get together now. No weapons, sadly, because even Suarez isn’t stupid enough to leave her with a knife. If he had, she could have gotten out of here weeks ago. But his paranoia has been gradually lightening with every foolish, adoring smile she’s given him, and she’d thought it wouldn’t be long before she had enough trust to get to a horse and get out of this Godforsaken country. She’s not sure whether to be relieved to have Athos and his friends for additional protection on the trip through two armies, or feel slightly resentful that they’ve spoiled her perfectly good escape plan with their messy abduction attempt.

Unfortunately, she is sure how she feels about Athos being there. Her heart jumped into her throat the second she realized who was standing at the door staring at her. He stood you up at the crossroads, and he isn’t here for you, she reminds herself ruthlessly. If he had turned up at the crossroads back then she would never have been in this ridiculous situation to start with.

“Listen, if you want the whole story, we’ve got a long ride back for me to tell it. I rather thought your current mission was time-sensitive, though. I can’t imagine any of your lot being able to go unnoticed for long. Now give me a gun, will you? And a knife if you’ve got one.”

They run into Porthos by the exit. He has Suarez over his shoulder, hanging limply, and his sword clutched tight in his other hand. His eyes go as round as livres when he spots her. “Milady de Winter?” he says, stunned.

“On occasion, yes,” she replies, giving him a smirk. She worries it’s weaker than her old smirk used to be, though – she feels weaker, frailer. The past months have not been kind to her. “I see you’ve tracked down my lord General. May we go, then? Are we heading to the stables?”

Porthos blinks at her for several seconds, then visibly pulls his mind back to the problem at hand. “Yeah, d’Artagnan’s getting us some horses. Hope he saddled up a spare.”

“So that explains where your Gascon’s run off to. What about Aramis?”

“Not here. I can see we got a lot of catching up to do, but maybe it’s worth saving for later,” Porthos says. “Sooner or later one of them’s going to raise the alarm.”

“Of course they are. Hurry up, then.”

Porthos mutters as an aside to Athos as they stride down the hall, “Next time, even if there _is_ a body, I’m not gonna believe it.”

Milady finds this incomprehensible, so she ignores it and focuses on getting out. The Musketeers’ plan sounds like it was stupid from the start. If she hadn’t seen them fight, she’d think it was suicide. But as it happens, she _has_ seen them fight, many times, so she knows exactly how they survive all these reckless, imbecilic schemes of theirs.

When they reach the stables, d’Artagnan’s reaction is even more extreme than Porthos’s. His mouth literally drops open, face paling. “ _Milady de Winter?_ ”

Apparently confirming people’s names in this stupid fashion every time you see them is a core tenet of Musketeer training. For God’s sake, you’d think she never turned up anywhere unexpectedly before, when in fact it’s her stock in trade.

“Why do you all keep you looking at me?” she says, irritated. “You’d think you were seeing a ghost.”

“We are,” d’Artagnan bursts out. “You’re supposed to be _dead_.”

“Sorry to disappoint. Is that horse for me?”

D’Artagnan has not, in fact, prepared an extra horse, but with a muttered order from Athos he rushes around readying another one. Athos lifts her onto it with trembling hands, and she tries to ignore the way they burn through her thin nightgown. People outside are crying the alarm. Either a body’s been found, or someone’s noticed the General’s missing. It won’t take long for them to check here.

Luckily, they manage to get away pretty quickly, and it’s not long before they’re riding hard for the border. The General’s slung across d’Artagnan’s horse, so their mission’s a success, and she’s no longer stuck in fucking Spain, so her night’s not going half-badly either.

“This way,” Anne orders breathlessly, twenty minutes in. “Follow me.”

“Are you sure -”

“ _This way_ ,” she repeats, and this time, they obey. The past few months have given her a pretty good idea what routes to take through the Spanish lines. Unlike the Musketeers, plotting is kind of her thing. It will get more chancy once she’s in France and on her own, but she has faith in her ability to manage. What she will do after that, with no money, no resources, no contacts and nowhere to go… well. She’ll do what she must.

It’s hours of hard riding before any of them relax. By then, the horses are starting to flag, but they’re far from any Spanish forces as far as she knows, so it’s safe to rest. The General’s woken up, but he’s gagged and tied, and he glares at her with absolute fury. She could admit she actually had nothing to do with his capture, but it’s more amusing to enjoy his impotent rage.

“How did you end up here?” Athos asks eventually, as they tie the horses. He’s been staring at her continually all night, a stunned look in his eyes. Really, it’s amazing he hasn’t fallen off the horse.

She wonders if he means how did she wind up in Spain, or how did she wind up in General Suarez’s bed. She shrugs lightly, choosing not to answer either, but he grabs her arm and pulls her to face him, fingers biting into her skin. It’s starting to get cold, the evening chill turning the nightgown she’s wearing from inappropriate to actually uncomfortable, even with the woolen cloak over it.

“No, don’t shrug at me. I thought you were _dead_.” His voice breaks on the final word, and they both politely ignore it. “You just disappeared after the crossroads. I thought Catherine had killed you.”

“She didn’t,” Milady says, stating the obvious. After the crossroads? Does that mean he came? He was hardly prompt, if that is the case. It was already sundown by the time Catherine arrived.

“I can see that. Why not?”

She sighs. “I don’t know, maybe she was trying to prove she was imaginative after all.” Then she ditches the flippancy at his expression, and continues in a softer voice. “Back in Paris, there was another person following me – or following us, rather. One of the city’s other Spanish spies wanted to get a better report on what happened when Rochefort’s whole scheme fell apart, and a lone woman seemed a better target than armed Musketeers. He offered Catherine money in return for me. She took it, hired some men, ambushed me, and the spy got what he wanted with no risk at all. And then when he realized I knew more than he thought, that I was Louis’s ex-mistress, he sent me off to Madrid.”

“Catherine said she made sure you got the same as your victim – Thomas. I thought she’d had you stabbed, or stabbed you herself.”

Now, she laughs. “My victim? And you thought she meant Thomas? You always did underrate Catherine’s selfishness. She meant her. She thought she would force me to be looked down on, treated like nothing, trapped, spat on, tortured… all the things she thinks I did to her. Only Catherine could think being a prisoner of Spain is at all the same thing as being a villager.”

“Tortured?” he asks, looking sickened. His hand on her arm relaxes slightly. He strokes it up and down, as if he’s trying to comfort her. Her arm burns and she wishes he would stop, the gesture too affectionate, too much like the past.

“For a while.” She shrugs again. She’s not about to pull up her nightdress and cloak to show him her scars. “But I played the empty-headed woman, a silly shallow girl who’d heard too much and knew the importance of none of it. Eventually it worked.”

“You didn’t tell them about Aramis,” he says, sounding surprisingly certain.

“No,” she admits. She would have told them, if she thought it would help, but she’s not an idiot. “They would’ve gone right for more extreme methods if they thought I had information like that, instead of the tidbits I fed them. Louis’s little tantrums, hints of what places he considers important, tensions between nobles, the mood in Paris. So many boring, little things that are almost useless… but not quite.”

“How did you end up _here_ , though? With the General?”

“General Suarez likes interrogating prisoners himself. Do you remember telling me the story of Scheherazade once?” He had often read to her in the evenings back when they were married. He’d loved stories, back then, and she’d loved listening to his voice as he told them. “I took inspiration from it. After a time he decided I knew nothing more, but when I was so grateful to him for his protection and so very kind and warm, why not keep me around?” She smiles without real amusement. “You of all people know how persuasive I can be. A little longer and I would have been free and clear and on my way back to France.”

“Why not England?” he says gruffly, and she can tell it pains him to ask.

“Because I have Catherine to deal with,” Milady says. “Oh, don’t look so worried, she has this coming. She sold me to be tortured to death.”

But Athos ruins her plans immediately, as he always seems to. “That was not the reason for my concern. Catherine died months ago.”

That pulls her up. “Did you kill her?” The words spill out of her before she can stop them. The idea of Athos killing Catherine for her fills her with curious warmth. She’d rather do it herself, but if someone else had to, her husband’s acceptable. Still, it was more likely to be the Spanish spy double-crossing Catherine, she supposes.

“No. Natural causes.” He is quite expressionless. “An illness of some kind.” 

“Natural fucking causes,” she says, incredulous. “Oh, well, of _course_. That’s just typical.” Months of dwelling happily on how she was going to kill the woman, and the bitch is already dead. And she died thinking she’d _won_ , which is even worse.

Not to mention Athos apparently let Catherine go, instead of forcing her to face some kind of punishment for supposedly ‘killing’ his wife. Her husband has truly reached new levels of indifference when it comes to her life. Maybe he’d seen abandoning her at the crossroads as finally and completely cutting her out of his life, never to return, and so what did it matter if she went to England or Hell, so long as she was gone?

“Anne…” he trails off as she steps back, out of range of his touch.

“What?” she snaps.

“I _would_ have killed her,” he says, surprising her.

She raises her eyebrows. “Well then, why didn’t you?”

“After I went to the crossroads and you weren’t there…. Well. I tried to find you. And once I knew she’d ambushed you, I tried to find Catherine as well.” He looks like the memory hurts him. “But by the time I tracked her down, she was already dead. I only got confirmation of what she’d done – or, well, what I thought was confirmation – from her widower.”

The idea of Catherine having gotten married is odd, but no stranger than the thought of her dead. And both of those are greatly overshadowed by the revelation that not only did Athos come to the crossroads to meet her, but he didn’t simply give up with a shrug when she wasn’t there. He tried to find her. And when that failed, he tried to find justice for her. And the look in his eyes now… it fills her with blind terror as much as hope, because she knows how their story always ends.

She falls back on flippancy. “You would have killed Catherine to get revenge for me? How romantic.” She waits for him to deny it, that knee-jerk response he always has when she tries to place a claim on him or seek one in return. He doesn’t.

“I would have seen her executed, at least. Do you really think I would let your murder go unpunished?” His voice scrapes over the word murder like it’s painful even to say.

Milady manages to laugh, but it’s a brittle sound. “Once upon a time, Athos, you were my murderer, and vice versa. Forgive me for thinking you might be glad to be rid of me. You didn’t exactly seem pleased to run into me again.” The wide-eyed horror in his eyes when he saw her has been bothering her.

“ _Rid_ of you?” he says, voice raw, and now the agony in his face is even clearer to see. She almost flinches from it. “Do you have any _idea_ what it was like, thinking you were dead once more? Thinking I was never going to see you again? I could barely get up in the morning. I could barely breathe. It was like there was nothing but an endless drop and I couldn’t stop _falling_.”

Athos doesn’t normally give speeches. He prefers to throw short sentences at her, blunt and destructive, and she’s always wished him to say more, to speak his mind. Now words are flooding from him like they’ve been dammed up too long, and she instead wishes he would stop, because these words are agony. She tries to draw in a breath to say something, to stop him, but she can’t.

He doesn’t stop. His eyes are glassy and wild. “You were everywhere but you were nowhere, at the same time. It was torture. And then suddenly you were really there, and you weren’t a ghost, and you expected me to just – to just greet you as if we met at the markets? I thought I had gone mad, if I wasn’t already.”

She’s taken aback by the force of his grief. It gentles her, eats away at her mask of amused distance. She can handle him drunk, infuriated, confused, violent, bitter, and cruel, but as always his sorrow disarms her completely. Before she can stop herself, she’s reaching out, resting her hand on his face, cupping his cheek. He turns his face into it, presses a kiss against the centre of her palm, and then looks at her with glassy eyes. “I thought you were dead,” he says simply, still raw.

“Well, I’m not.” Stating the obvious again, but what else can she say right now? Her mouth is dry and she seems to have lost all her usual eloquence.

He moves so suddenly that for a moment she automatically expects an attack and tenses, but instead he pulls her against him in a fierce embrace, surrounding her with his warmth, his feeling, his palpable relief. She can also feel his anguish at thinking her dead – it’s in the way he grips her with almost painful need, pressing her to him like if he lets go she’ll vanish once more. He hasn’t held her like this in a long time, and she’s surprised by how desperately she’s missed it. Suddenly, tears burn her eyes as well, and she rests her cheek upon his chest with a little sigh, melting into the embrace, finally home.

X_X_X_X_X

He holds her close for a long time. Feels her heart beating against his chest, her breath against his neck, the warmth of her flush against him. He allows himself to believe she’s really alive, that it’s not some dream or hallucination, that she’s truly in front of him. He buries his face in her hair, and finds himself saying the words over and over again, half-sobbing them like a prayer: _you’re alive, you’re alive_. He inhales her scent like a drug and feels something within him mend, some deep wound start to knit. He’s wanted to do this from the moment he saw her again, but she’d been rattling off questions and comments, and he’d been so confused by the unexpected and almost casual response to seeing him that he’d been caught off-guard. He clutches her tighter and presses his lips against the smooth skin of her forehead, breathing in her scent, and she stirs against him for a moment and then relaxes into it again with a light hum of happiness.

He's distantly aware that the others will be watching them – d’Artagnan probably with a look of resignation, Porthos with an amused smile, and the bound and gagged Suarez with absolute fury – but their thoughts are unimportant. All that’s important is that she’s in his arms again.

She feels different against him, lighter, more breakable. She’s always been slender but right now she’s thin in a way that speaks of some time without proper food. Her collarbones and cheekbones jut out of the skin, and she’s paler than she should be, more tired-looking. He wonders what length of time she meant when she said she’d been tortured ‘a while’, wonders what kind of torture it was. He wonders if he should be freeing Suarez out of gratitude for stopping whatever they were doing to her, or killing him for having allowed it to be inflicted in the first place and for the sordid reasons why he stopped it. He would greatly prefer to do the latter.

Athos knows some of the things he and his men have done to obtain information they needed. The thought of the Spanish doing anything like that to her sickens him and enrages him; it is agonizing to imagine. He abruptly feels an almost savage happiness at the thought of how many enemy soldiers he’s killed, replacing the previous guilt, confusion and self-hatred – if any of them were in any way complicit in hurting his wife, they deserved worse.

But then, how hypocritical is that? It’s not like he’s never hurt her himself. Hell, he’s probably hurt her more than the rest of the world put together.

“Stop it,” she says against his chest.

It takes him a moment to comprehend, and then he forces his arms to release her, for all that it feels like cutting some vital part of him away. He starts to move back from her, embarrassed and ashamed, cursing himself. He shouldn’t have grabbed her like that, shouldn’t have pulled her into his arms as if he had the right – but she presses forward so she remains there, fitting herself against him once more, winding her own arms around him.

“I meant, stop brooding,” she clarifies. “I could practically hear you wallowing in guilt, although I’ve no idea why. You’re mostly blameless this time.”

“But not completely.” If he’d turned up just a little earlier…

“When are either of us ever completely blameless?” She leans back a little, tilting her head to look him in the eyes. “But _I_ don’t blame you, if that matters. And besides, I’m fine.”

“Are you really?”

Anne looks worn to threads by whatever she’s been through, and she’s as light as a bird in his arms, hollow-boned and fragile. But there’s nothing fragile about the glare she bends on him, green fire in her eyes and a flush to her pale face.

She scoffs. “All these years and still you doubt me? I’m quite accustomed to rising from the dead, Athos. Give me a few hours and I’ll be ready to be on my way, with or without you lot. It’s probably better if it’s without -”

“ _No._ ”

It comes out blunter and rougher than he intended, but she merely raises an amused eyebrow, and he gets the feeling she was deliberately provoking a heated response. She looks satisfied, made almost smug by his fervency. “No?”

“Stay with me,” he says simply, more plea than command. “Come back with me.”

“Back to whatever nasty, stinking army camp you currently occupy?” She gives him a deliberately unimpressed look, but there’s a curve to her lip that softens it. “To share your tent, I suppose, and live off rations, and help collect and collate information, and stab the occasional Spaniard? That’s your offer?”

Women are allowed in war camps – in fact, are all but required in many war camps, although they aren’t usually wives. There’s none with the Musketeers, but that’s because their camp moves so often, is threatened with violence so continually – it’s considered too harsh a living situation for a woman, though Athos has seen many women manage worse ones. Regardless, Anne is hardly an ordinary woman, she’s tougher than any five of his men put together, and she would be very valuable to their efforts if she was willing to try. And beyond valuable to him personally. He can’t like the thought of her in danger, but at least he will be there to protect her if necessary, and it’s not like there’s many safe places for Milady de Winter at present – not like there’s many safe places for any of them, in fact. Wars don’t stay just on battlefields.

She’s right that it’s hardly a good offer, but it’s surely better than her riding off into the horizon alone, weakened and penniless, to an uncertain fate. And despite her façade, he can see the momentary flash of interest and consideration in her gaze.

“Yes,” he says, still going for simplicity. He could quit, of course, leave with her, and accompany her into that uncertain fate. If she says no to this, he might have to consider that option. Of course, if she doesn’t want him around at all, he at least needs to convince her to return to the camp with him briefly so he can give her whatever coin he has, try and ensure her comfort and safety for the near future in the only way he can. But he thinks this is best – in danger, but together, with his steady income as captain to live off and a regiment of Musketeers around them.

She studies him, and after a pause she smiles, something so genuine in it that his heart twists in his chest. “Alright then,” she says, as casually as if she’s agreeing to nothing more than a drink. “I do owe the Spanish a bit of stabbing, I suppose. But if your quixotic devotion to this country gets me killed, Athos, I swear I’ll haunt you.”

“You always have,” he says vehemently, more grateful for that than he can say. He pulls her close to him again, even the half-inch of space too much, and he feels her heartbeat against his, the warmth of her body, the throb of her pulse, her breath against his neck.

This time, instead of resting her head on his chest, though, she places her hand on the back of his head and forces his lips down onto hers, expressing her enthusiasm for the idea of a bit of tent-sharing by the most direct method possible. 

She’s alive, and she’s with him. For the first time in a very long time, Athos feels whole.


End file.
